I have a 32-bit Windows XP Pro system with three identical WD RE SATA drives. One drive is for the OS and the other two for data. This is a non-RAID system installed on an Intel DP35DP mobo with an E6850 C2D processor and P35/ICH9R chipset. I would like to move the data from the two data drives to a new RAID-1 pair. Then I would like to mirror the OS drive to one of the old data drives as another RAID-1 pair (Intel's "Rapid Recovery" RAID-1'ish backup system). I've got a couple of very basic questions: 1. Can I do this without re-installing the OS? I.e., once XP is installed non-RAID does it take a re-install to enable RAID? 2. Once the system is RAID-ready (whether from a re-install or otherwise), can I have multiple RAID volumes? I.e., a "Rapid Recovery" volume and a separate data volume? I'm trying to upgrade an older system and I've never stumbled down this particular path before. Thanks for any and all help. Dick
1.) It can be moved, but requires a lot of reconfiguration that I don't remember how to do. 2.) You can have as many RAID volumes as you want. I would recomend actualy RAID1 over "Rapid Recovery" or any other company-specific redundancy solution. The beauty of true RAID1 is that even if the controller/mainboard fails and is replaced with something very different, you still loose no data, and you do not need to rebuild or do any other crap to get at the data.
Thanks, that's good to know. I would love to hear from someone who has actually done this and can point me in the right direction. The advantage I saw to using the Intel-specific approach was that it is supported in their BIOS and OS recovery can be initiated at that level. Gigabyte has the same thing which they call "Xpress Recovery2." Again, the advantage I see is that the OS recovery process can be initiated at the BIOS level. This is one of those things that look good on paper, but I have no actual experience with. Hence my request for input here. I appreciate your response and would like to see others with experience in this area chime in. Oh, one other question: is S.M.A.R.T. disk error recovery compatible with RAID? I have heard that S.M.A.R.T. hides error recovery whereas RAID wants to see it and handle it on its own. Someone told me I should enable S.M.A.R.T. on my non-RAID OS disks, but disable it on my RAID volumes. Can you or anyone confirm this? Thanks again for your response. Dick
-You just described the problem I was talking about...you need a specific brand of mainboard to do a recovery...plus you have to do a recovery. With RAID-1, the system keeps working even with a dead boot drive; the data automaticaly gets read from the other drive that is still working. Most (~99%) raid controlers have bios-like utilities like you are describing as well. -I leave S.M.A.R.T. turned on with RAID. It does not actualy hide errors, it just records them and passes the information along to the controller so that the controler can write around the errors, thus making them seem invisible. Most RAID adapters will do this anyway, but it does not hurt to do it twice. Also, S.M.A.R.T. does other drive monitoring, including the temperature sensors.
